Heidi Harley: Idioms (reply to Martha McGinnis)

[Martha McGinnis]

Hi all --

Martha's excellent examples and discussion
do go a long way to allaying my concerns.
Especially the '??he's recognizing me' class
of progless non-idioms is something that
ought to confound Jim H., I think.

However, I do have a concern with the
examples of progful idioms that Martha
gives, which will take a minute to lay out.

The characterization of accomplishment
verbs as taking a 'for' adverbial is incomplete --
the 'climb the mountain' accomplishments
do certainly allow it, but there's some
that canonically don't:

#I built the house for an hour.
#I ate the cookie for 5 minutes.

and are usually remarked upon as only allowing the 'for'
adverbials when the object is in 'partitive' case, or,
in English, modified by a PP:

I built on the house for an hour.
I ate at the cookie for 5 mins.

(The 'climb the mountain' example is like
'run the race': a canonical activity verb
with an additional delimiting object
argument -- and of course activity verbs
allow 'for' modification.  These 'build'
and 'eat' verbs require objects, though.)

So the question is, how do we distinguish between
the 'build the house' accomplishments, which don't
allow the 'for' modification, and the progful
achievements? The difference between 'he's building
the house' and 'he's winning the race' seems to
be that the 'building the house' is mid-event -- you're
partly completed building the house --
while 'winning the race' is pre-event: you're not
partway through winning the race, rather, you're in the
lead at the moment, but the instant of winning is
at the finish line, and you can't have the race
half-won, although you can have the house half-
built. (don't say, what about a house-building race?)

So to get back to the idiom question, are the
examples that Martha gives as being progful
acheivements, because they don't accept
'for'-adverbials -- are they like 'build
the house' accomplishments or like
'win the race' achievements?

>(23)  I found my feet in a month.
>(24)??I found my feet for a month.
>(25)  I'm still finding my feet.

it seems to me that 'finding my feet' is in
some sense 'mid-event' -- that is, you can
be halfway along in finding your feet, unlike
winning a race. If that's right, it's
an idiom of the 'build' class, not of the
'win' class.

Of the other ones that Martha suggests are
progful achievements, 'cross the Rubicon' and
'earn X's wings' seem to me to be more like
the 'build the house' accomplishments, not
like the 'win the race' achievements.

For me, however, 'make the grade' and
'give up the ghost...' are more acheivement-like,
intuitively. But, maddeningly, 'give up the
ghost' doesn't seem to go as well with progressives
  -- or insofar as it does, it doesn't mean
'pre-event', it means during the event,
at the instant -- like 'croak' or 'kick the bucket':

?He's giving up the ghost.
(*He was giving up the ghost for 2 hours before the end.)

'He's making the grade,' though, doesn't seem
bad, and it does seem pre-event (I don't think
you can have made the grade just halfway, right?)
So I think this is, I hope, I hope, an example
of a progful acheivement idiom. thoughts?

Kate Kearns also sent me a note pointing out
among other things that one of the properties
of achievement progressives is that they don't accept
modification by 'still', plus a couple of other things.
Here's the relevant citation from Kate's note:

"Anita Mittwoch's (1991) paper 'In defence of
Vendler's achievements', Belgian Journal of Linguistics
vol 6, pp. 71-85. She talks about the 'die/win the race' type,
and says that their progressives aren't like real
process progressives because they can't be modified by
continuative 'still' or be in complements to 'stop,
start, continue, keep' and so on."

I still haven't gone to find the paper and check out
her examples, but I thought the list might be interested.

(The reason i wanted to suggest to Jim that there's no
significant distance between accomplishments of the
'build' class and achievements is to cut through this
whole tangled question; they behave the same w/r to
time adverbials, and their interpretations with
progressives are darn slippery. but for 'die' and
'win' and 'reach the top' the pre-event vs. mid-event
distinction does seem fairly robust).

Anyway, any thoughts? maybe i'm missing something
obvious. and the judgments are kind of subtle. there
might be better tests out there.
Marf? prove me wrong, please! and thanks v. much
for the input,

hh



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Heidi Harley
Department of Linguistics
Douglass 200E
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721
Ph: (520) 626-3554
Fax: (520) 626-9014
hharley at u.arizona.edu